Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Education Health Care Analogy by RonnieFan

According to the Cato Institute the average per student cost of public K-12 education is $19,000 per student per year compared to $8,300 per private school student. We all know private schooling is better and it’s over 50% cheaper on average. Free sure is expensive. With what we’re spending on “free” public education, we could not only send all kids to private school, we could buy premium health insurance for the uninsured and have billions left over, maybe trillions. But instead we’ll add expensive wasteful dollars to wasteful heath care dollars to have two less effective, more expensive systems.

I have to agree with your pessimism. Anyone who takes even a shallow look at how Social Security works will see that it is an unsustainable rip-off Ponzi scheme. If the money that was taken from us were instead put into anything that yields even modest compound interest, we’d all be able to enjoy very comfortable retirements from the gains.

And yet, SSI is politically impossible to remove — or even curtail. Remember the howls when Bush proposed allowing us to opt for taking a single-digit percentage and investing we see fit? That proposal sank like a lead balloon.

The Democrats are quite justified in being confident that once an entitlement program is enacted, it is never repealed. Instead it is amended with more piled-on bureaucracy and legislation.